


All Here

by Barkour



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-09
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-28 18:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/677285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bart came to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Here

**Author's Note:**

> A very frantic, spur of the moment response to today's new episode of Young Justice Invasion, "War." Spoilers ahoy!

The world bucked beneath him, and Bart came to, spitting blood out from between his teeth. His tongue felt raw, pulped. Dizzy, struggling to focus his eyes, he stuffed a finger in his mouth and felt at his tongue. A gash marked it, halfway up. He’d nearly bit his tongue off. Only his accelerated healing factor had saved it.

Bart made to push himself up and fell again, pain lancing through his head. Blood. More blood. He hocked it onto the ground – metal, not soil – the blood had spattered across his fingertips and this wasn’t – this wasn’t – he remembered red lights, fire – the Watchtower! He dragged for breath, but it was slow to come, his chest aching, his head swollen, dark spots flitting like a patchwork film over everything.

He felt at the back of his head. The hair was matted, clumped with – blood, again. Someone had hit him? He couldn’t think, not clearly. Bart blinked, hard, and rolled his eyes to clear his sight, trying to remember, trying to—

Jaime.

Bart surged up and staggered, collapsing to his knees. Jaime had been standing beside him, right next to Bart, close enough their arms nearly brushed. Jaime—

Bodies. Why were there bodies? The team. This was the team, and they were still, all of them, scattered across the hangar. His vision spotted again. The air was thin. He found his breathing shallow, short, and the thought emerged, suddenly, that this was a dream; he was dreaming again, that he had failed, that—what? It slithered away from him.

Where was Jaime?

Bart said—He gagged first on the thinness of the atmosphere and then on the last dregs of blood that had pooled in his sinuses when he’d been struck and now come down to his throat. The blacking of his vision, the struggle to breathe–he’d been struck on the head, but if his tongue had nearly healed, then his head would have, too.

Hypoxia. The oxygen had depleted. The hangar had been compromised—how? He couldn’t remember; it didn’t matter.

Bart clambered to his feet though his legs hurt, hurt in a way they had never hurt before. It was the weight of his own body, slowing him. He struggled to move, but he did move. There was the team, thrown throughout the hangar. Jaime, too. A sickening fear had come to sit in Bart’s gut. Where was Jaime?

He got to the controls at the airlock, but they were gone, scraped through with some enormous thing that had left the electronics and wiring gutted. Bart wavered and caught the wall, clinging to it and waiting as the vertigo washed through him; but the dizziness did not abate this time. The atmosphere would go anoxic in a few minutes. He would die then, deprived of oxygen. They all would.

The thought came without alarm. He had thought he would be afraid when he died. He was afraid, but not of death. They were there, the team, all of them or most of them; he was too tired to count, to think of names and faces, who had done what. All of them were there, everyone but Jaime.

He couldn’t think of why. He didn’t want to think of why. He knew; he didn’t want to know. Not Jaime, he thought; but it had always been Jaime inside the suit. Not Jaime. The Reach had come for Jaime before.

There were oxygen controls on the far side of the hangar, at the airlock that opened onto the Watchtower. Bart, swaying, pushed off the wall and then he fell. His chin struck the floor with bruising force. His teeth cut his tongue again. He found he didn’t much care. The taste of blood in his mouth was nothing new.

Lights, bright and dark, popped like firecrackers. He closed his eyes. The lights went on popping. He didn’t mind that either. He was thinking of a blue sky over a blue ocean. Sweat on his skin. A hot breeze pulled at his hair. The surfboard rocked gently beneath him, rolling up then down again with the force of the tide coming in. Grandma Iris, young and red-haired and mostly flat-bellied, shouted, “Bart! Barry’s here with the ice cream!”

“All right!” he shouted back, but he didn’t go in just yet. He was trying to see how long he could get away with staring at the sun before he had to blink. It hurt his eyes to do it, and Uncle Jay said not to do it, but the sun was so very bright, so much brighter than anything he’d ever dreamed. The tide lapped at his knees. He spread his toes wide and kicked through the water, pushing out, just a little further out to sea. He wondered how far out he could go, how far out it all went. In his head he was a little cartoon Bart with a huge astronaut helmet, running the length of the ocean floor.

The sun burned. Bart tipped his face up to it. After a little while, he dozed, just like that. Grandpa Barry was calling his name, but he didn’t want to get up. He was daydreaming about Jaime on a board next to his, Jaime with his short black hair in saltwater spikes and his left cheek creasing as he smiled, slow and easy. Something warm slipping through Bart’s chest, like a drop of red food dye squirted into a glass of water.

“Come on,” said Jaime, “I thought you were gonna show me something way crash.”

Bart said, “All right. But you have to try to keep up. Okay? You gotta stay with me.”

The sun was in Jaime’s hair. It made his shoulders, water-slicked and firm, gleam, made his face shine so Bart could hardly see.

“I’m with you,” said Jaime.

*

He was dreaming and in his dream, Captain Atom said, “We should have expected this,” and Bart thought, Expected what? His ice cream was melting down his fingers, faster than he could eat it, but it was cold outside and snowing and the snow was black like ash raining down from a fire. Jaime said, “Don’t eat it too fast. You’ll give yourself a headache,” and then, still laughing, he brought a stone down against the back of Bart’s head.

“You should have expected this,” said Captain Atom, and they were taking Jaime away.

Bart woke. The ceiling was white; a fluorescent light looked back at him as he blinked up at it. He was in a bed, still clothed, with a mask strapped to his face. He tugged curiously at the tube feeding into the mask and followed it to the wall, where it attached. A small label read O2 _._ Dioxygen. He fumbled for the mask.

“He’s up,” someone called—Green Arrow, from across the medical bay.

Someone else pushed Bart down again. Black Canary, her mouth tight.

“You’re recovering from hypoxic hypoxia,” she said. “You need to be still.”

Bart ripped the mask off.

“Impulse!”

“Sorry,” he said, “no time. Where’s Jaime?”

A thought, flickering like a light: “Dude! Secret identity, remember!”

“Blue Beetle,” Bart amended, _Jaime_ –the arching ai, the long e—still warm on his tongue. “Where’s Blue—the Reach, they must have grabbed him—they broke into the Watchtower somehow—”

He had a memory of it, or he’d dreamed it. He remembered Jaime standing next to him, and then—It was gone.

“He’s not here,” said Black Canary. She pushed Bart down again and he stayed a moment there under her hands, trying to remember, failing to do so.

“We have to get him,” said Bart. He swatted her hands away. Dreams lingered, fresh in his mind, fresher even than the memory of what Jaime had said, turning to him in the hangar. “We have to find him, before they reset the scarab—they’ll kill him to do it.”

“It’s me,” Jaime had said—no, not then, but before when Bart had found him in the Reach’s ship, Jaime emerging from the scarab’s shell and reaching out for Bart.

“It was your friend who did this!”

Arsenal—there, pulling off his own oxygen mask as Green Arrow looked helplessly to Black Canary.

“He betrayed us,” said Arsenal, “he betrayed all of us, left us to die—”

“No,” said Bart, “no, he wouldn’t—”

The medical bay was cramped, too many beds, too many bodies. Someone was missing.

“Superboy is with Captain Atom and Nightwing,” Black Canary said quietly to Impulse. “They’re reviewing everything right now.”

 “Nobody died,” said Green Arrow, but Arsenal cut in:

“Not for lack of trying.”

Wonder Girl made a sound, a low groan that silenced them all. Her fingers flexed, working as she woke. Black Canary rose to go to her.

“He didn’t,” said Bart, but no one was listening, not to him, not anymore. His teeth ached, his jaw clenched. He wanted, desperately, to run, but where could he go on the Watchtower that they couldn’t find him? “He _didn’t_.”

Arsenal crouched beside Wonder Girl and touched her shoulder as Black Canary fussed with the oxygen tubing and Green Arrow went to check on Bumblebee and Guardian, then Robin. Beast Boy. Bart’s chest was too tight, as if he’d swallowed something and choked on it.

He didn’t, Bart thought, he didn’t he didn’t he didn’t he didn’t he didn’t he didn’t—

They stood close together, close enough if Bart had turned just a bit, their arms would brush, their hands graze. He was going to turn, to say, _Yeah, and did you see how crash yours truly was in there?_ and Jaime would say, _Sure, you were crash, all right, but you weren’t as baller as I was, hermano_ , and Jaime would smile, that awful blue and black mask less awful for Jaime beneath it.

Jaime said, “Well, the gang’s all here.”

Bart’s breath stuck. His heartbeat deafened; it drowned out even that drone in his head, that loudly repeating _no no no no no no no no no_ that went on without pause. In the medical bay, Bart felt at the back of his head. The hair there was crusted with blood. The skin beneath his fingers was sore, but the ache was a distant ache; the wound there had long since closed, the bruising in the bone healed.

He was breathing, but he couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t do it. Black Canary, rising again, noticed.

“Impulse, you need to calm down. You’re hyperventilating—”

He didn’t want the oxygen mask again. He didn’t want Black Canary to touch his shoulders in comfort, to guide him down to bed again to sleep and dream and forget for a while. He didn’t want any of it.

“He didn’t,” said Bart loudly. “That wasn’t Jaime.”

“I don’t care who it was,” said Arsenal savagely. “That son of a—”

“Roy,” Green Arrow warned.

Black Canary knelt before Bart. He looked to her; he needed—someone had to understand, someone had to know, to get that—

“It wasn’t him,” Bart said, “that wasn’t Jaime—”

“Whoever it was,” said Black Canary, and under the reassuring tones lay steel, “they took the key to the War World.”

Bart saw: ash, falling like snow. The medical bay was cold, chilled by the automated air conditioning system on the Watchtower.

Black Canary stood. “You need to lie down again. Take deep breaths.”

He shook his head, shook it again, felt the world blurring around him. “I have to go.”

“Where are you going to go?” she asked. The question was rhetorical.

“I have to—”

Find Jaime, he thought. Save Jaime. The thought came to him, unwanted: And if there is no Jaime left to find?

“Right now,” Black Canary said firmly, “the only thing you have to do is rest. There will be time later for everything else.”

“No,” said Bart, thinking of the way Jaime laughed, a little breathless, a little shy, a lot dry, “there isn’t, we don’t have any time, we have to—”

But he could think of nothing but Jaime, smiling at him. Jaime, gone. Bart covered his face, his fingers over his eyes. His head pounded; his eyes burned; he remembered: _the gang's all here_. And Jaime was not. Bart was here and Jaime was not.

You can still fight, Bart thought. We can still fight to protect the world. He thought of Grandpa Barry, of Grandma Iris, of Uncle Jay and Aunt Joan, and Wally, and his unborn father and unborn aunt, of his mother somewhere out there, just born herself, of Nate who had helped him build the time machine in the first place and then warned him he could never come back; and Bart thought--but he hadn't known. He hadn't known about Jaime, and now he did. And he would still fight.

"He's coming to," Black Canary called to Green Arrow. "Gar, can you hear me? Gar?" She bent over him, her hair like sunlight spilling over her shoulder. Like sunlight coming through a cloud.

Jaime had come back before. "It's me," he'd said, reaching for Bart. "It's me."

Bart exhaled. He breathed in again and out again, deep breaths, till his heart slowed and he could think again, really think. Okay, he thought. Okay. He'd survived before. He'd survive this, too. He'd survive. He thought about blue skies and blue waters, a clean, warm breeze and the idea of ice cream melting in his mouth and Aunt Joan pressing a spoon to his forehead when he got a brain freeze. Okay, he thought again. Okay. He took another breath and then he lowered his hands. There was dried blood on the back of his fingers, but that would come off.

"What can I do to help?" he asked.


End file.
